It was a career defining encounter for interviewer Cathal O’Shannon, who praised Ali’s deftness in that area and noted that the champ said things “he would not have been able to say in America.”

It’s doubtful that O’Shannon was referring to the name calling, part of Ali’s campaign to draw Frazier back into the ring. (The champ got his wish less than two years later, when he defeated Frazier at Madison Square Garden in the second of their three fights.)

What’s more likely is that O’Shannon was alluding to the original poem Ali recites from memory, one minute into clip above, after orienting Irish viewers to the previous fall’s Attica Prison uprising, still the deadliest in U.S. history.

Ali imagines himself in the shoes of a black prisoner, responding to the white warden issuing a final ultimatum. His reply, which could be taken as a call to arms , but which Ali touchingly calls a “poetic poem,” takes the form of a dozen tercets:

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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.